Allen, managing director of the RJR Group, the island’s largest broadcasting company, disclosed that his company felt disrespected by the tardiness of some Jamaican athletes at the awards function.
“My organization was very disappointed with the National Sportsman and Sportswoman-of-the-Year function,” he said.
“We do it once a year. We invite those sporting stars from all over the World when they are nominated to come home, pay for them to come home, put them up, honour them, so you can imagine how disappointed we were when we had many of our sporting stars late for the function, putting everybody in chaos”.
According to media reports, the athletes were not in favour of Jamaica-born World 400 metres champion Sanya Richards of the United States being the keynote speaker at the event.
“The function started to get out of hand because persons who were supposed to be there to collect things (awards) weren’t there on time,” said Allen.
“You invite people to honour them, to show your respect to them, and you have leaders of the country who are there to prepare to listen to a guest speaker, but you have sporting persons who are saying I don’t think I should listen to this person.
He added: “It’s like a big disrespect to those of us who were involved in the process, and who were committing millions of dollars to honour them.
“We even booked hotel rooms for some persons to stay within where the function was being held…I was told that one of those persons was more than an hour late coming from upstairs to the function downstairs.”
Allen said: “Another person said that they weren’t well and could not come to the function, but they were visiting another athlete in the hotel while the function was going on.
“It is for that reason, and because we believe that you must be disciplined, why the RJR management team is at this point reconsidering whether we will do it again next year.”
Some of the athletes have already offered public apologies to the organisers, and noted they got stuck in Kingston’s gridlocked traffic, following training sessions that ran overtime on the day of the event.
